Age: 17.
Appearance: "Ironic."
Sorry, do you mean that it looks ironic? Or that it appears to look ironic? Or that it appears to look "ironic"? Hey, impose your own paradigm. I'm just here to provoke.
Oh right, well I'm off home then ... No wait! I also crave attention! Look at the latest copy of Vice magazine! It has restaged the suicides of some famous women writers, and bulked it out with the suicides of some less famous ones!
They've what? It's for the new Fiction Issue dedicated to women's writing. It has used models and stylists to make pretty photographs out of the suicides of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Iris Chang, Sanmao, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elise Cowen.
But Chang wrote non-fiction and Parker didn't kill herself. Look, when you've been making lists of things in magazines for as long as I have, you learn not to get too strung up in those kinds of details. It's the idea that's important.
I see. And what is the idea here then? I don't know. That suicide is cool?
Um, are you sure about that? It is, after all, hard to imagine saying anything more dangerous or irresponsible. And in the words of Vice's chief creative officer Eddy Morretti: "We know how to speak to young people. They're listening to us. We're a trusted brand for them." It's journalism! People don't actually listen to the opinions!
Then why do they publish them? "Why" is such a bourgeois concept. That's not Vice's bag. It started out as a kind of clever Canadian lad mag, and has evolved into a global multimedia brand for people called hipsters.
They're the people who look stupid on purpose, right? That's right. And they love the magazine's mix of sweary and risque fashion content with quixotic frontline reporting – such as the caper earlier this year when Dennis Rodman and a group of other basketball players visited North Korea and met the supreme leader Kim Jong-un.
People are pretty disgusted by this suicide thing though, judging from the internet. Oh no, that's just "disgust". The two are easily confused.
Do say: "Needlessly annoying people in order to get attention is a common tactic among the under-fives."
Don't say: "Made you look!"
